21–30 of 164 posts
Before reading this I didn’t realize how today gaming is different from 80’s and 90’s gaming , to the point Kazeta is a thing! I thought that mostly, CDs had replaced cartridges and loading games became slow, but apparently subscription plans, online chat and “micro transactions” are now accepted as standard gaming?!
Before reading this I didn’t realize how today gaming is different from 80’s and 90’s gaming , to the point Kazeta is a thing! I thought that mostly, CDs had replaced cartridges and loading games became slow, but apparently subscription plans, online chat and “micro transactions” are now accepted as standard gaming?!
Have you been living under a rock for the last 15+ years? I haven't touched a CD since the late 2000s.
Happy to see they're actually putting the games onto the cartridges. Most projects like this just use pieces of plastic with an NFC/RFID tag containg the Steam game ID. For me, the fact that the data is actually right there in my hand is half the appeal.
On SNES, and I believe N64 as well, cartridges could also expand the graphical capability of the system, which made some games really special.
Replicating this on a modern indie console would, of course, be prohibitively expensive and impractical. The speed of modern hardware and physical media, along with more sophisticated game engines, has also practically eliminated loading screens. And this likely wouldn't be an issue on small indie games either.
Still, this is not strictly about loading screens. There was something magical about game consoles before roughly the fifth generation which we're unlikely to ever experience again. Nostalgia probably plays a role in that feeling, but the way they worked was truly different from what we have today. Modern game consoles are essentially small PCs within a walled garden.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you been living under a rock for the last 15+ years? I haven't touched a CD since the late 2000s.
CDs specifically are obsolete, but games on optical media are still a thing. Unlike ROM cartridges, which AFAICT died with the GBA in 2008.
Happy to see they're actually putting the games onto the cartridges. Most projects like this just use pieces of plastic with an NFC/RFID tag containg the Steam game ID. For me, the fact that the data is actually right there in my hand is half the appeal.
I appreciate that as well, but SD cards still aren't the same as old game cartridges. On consoles up to the Nintendo 64, plugging in a cartridge expanded the physical memory of the system, and the CPU read data directly from the ROM on the cartridge. This is why there were no loading screens. On SNES, and I believe N64 as well, cartridges could also expand the graphical capability of the system, which made some games…
Before reading this I didn’t realize how today gaming is different from 80’s and 90’s gaming , to the point Kazeta is a thing! I thought that mostly, CDs had replaced cartridges and loading games became slow, but apparently subscription plans, online chat and “micro transactions” are now accepted as standard gaming?!
Neat concept. I had to dig through a lot of the docs before I could get a good grasp of exactly how this works, though. It's an OS that mounts/searches all drives (such as an SD card reader) for the first available KZI file which is a format that describes how a specific game is run (the runtime, additional gamescope options, etc). While the idea of essentially mimicking old school carts by having a dedicated SD card…
I hope it also supports putting multiple games on one cartridge and choosing between them at boot time? Don't see a reason to waste a multi-gigabyte SD card on a single ROM of a few megabytes.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
CDs specifically are obsolete, but games on optical media are still a thing. Unlike ROM cartridges, which AFAICT died with the GBA in 2008.
While they’re flash rather than rom, the switch 2 still supports physical distribution media.